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Eternal God, in whom we live and move and have our being,

we bring before you in prayer and trust, our town and our country.

 

We thank you for all who serve our communities in the spirit of the common good,

working together to improve the facilities and services we all rely on every day.

We thank you for all our elected officials,

Local Councillors, and members of Parliament,

and for the years of public service they have given to our communities.

As we come to these elections we pray for all the candidates from each of the parties.

We pray that they will be people of integrity and vision,

with a sense of the common good

and a commitment to learn of and meet the needs of those they will represent.

 

Especially we pray that matters of social justice

and provision for our more vulnerable citizens

will be given both priority and resources.

You are a God of faithfulness, mercy and justice,

and we pray that those values will be reflected not only in manifestos,

but in creative policies that enable and support people

towards a more secure and flourishing life.

 

We pray for our schools and hospitals, our police and emergency services;

we pray for social care and services,

for foodbanks and other charities and organisations

that contribute to the lives and wellbeing of those in our town and County.

 

For ourselves we pray that you will guide our thinking,

as responsible citizens in our community,

and as citizens of heaven and followers of Jesus.

Give us wisdom and discernment,

and a determination to play our own part

in making life around us more positive and more caring,

so that by our working together there can be a flourishing of life

and a renewal of energy, initiative and co-operation.

God of hope and justice, renew our political life,

restore values of honesty, respect, responsibility and public spirited service.

 

Give strength and moral courage to those who serve faithfully and well,

and who by example show these values of public service for the common good,

Hear our prayers and may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,

So may your Kingdom come, Amen   

On one of my regular walks we pass the Episcopal Church. The side of the building has this cross displayed. It faces the road, the car park, and towards the distant hills. Do those parking their cars notice it? What about the regular walkers going down to the village for their daily constitutional, does it ever occur to them to give it a passing thought? Do passing motorists glance over and see it? If not, then who is it for?

I photographed this mathematically precise cross on one of those late winter days of bright sunlight and blue skies. It was the shadow that made me look twice – it was evocative of lines that came to mind without searching through the memory files.

Whatever else Holy Saturday conveys of emotion, image, memory, devotion or whatever, it's the day when we face the reality of an empty cross, without the comfort of an empty tomb. I find the sharp angled plainness of this cross deeply disconcerting, which is as it should be. The cross is not a thing of beauty, and perhaps we are too quick to soften its lines, round off its angles, give it some colour, make it more aesthetically and therefore more emotionally acceptable.

But what can possibly make the cross acceptable, attractive even? All this week I have explored images of the cross, and tried to understand even the first fringes of truth knowing it would still be beyond our grasp. And yet. One of the paradoxes that goes to the heart of our faith is that there is, despite all that points to the contrary, a beauty and a cause for wonder in the cross, whether imaged in art and photograph, sung or played in music, read or prayed or written in word. There is a strange beauty in the brokenness, a glory in the tragedy, a truth that renders hopeful so much else in our lives that seems cause for despair, or at least indifference. 

The words that came to mind as I took this photograph are these: 

I take, O cross, thy shadow
  for my abiding place:
I ask no other sunshine than
  the sunshine of his face;
content to let the world go by,
  to know no gain nor loss;
my sinful self my only shame,
  my glory all the cross.

The hymn begins:

Beneath the cross of Jesus
  I fain would take my stand,
the shadow of a mighty Rock
  within a weary land…

Forgive the following personal reminiscence, but it helps explain much of what my life has been, and been about. Fifty five years ago today, exactly to the day, I enacted those first lines of the hymn. I can remember the place, the time and the circumstances in which as a young man of 16 years, I took my stand alongside Jesus, and beneath his cross. Yes, a classic evangelical conversion narrative, complete with a life already in trouble, potential squandered, and life chances already decreasing in a life going down the drain. But on April 16, 1967, in repentant faith and then wondering gratitude, I offered my life to Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. Ever since, beneath the cross of Jesus has been my abiding place.

All that has happened in my life since, I owe to what I now know was my response of faith to a love that came looking for me, love such as I never imagined. Throughout the subsequent years of Christian existence I have prayed and read, preached in churches and shared in conversations, written books and articles, about the love of God in Christ. These Holy Week blog posts are part of that same ministry of glad indebtedness 'beneath the cross of Jesus'.

On this Holy Saturday, 55 years on, looking again at this steel grey cross engineered with such precision, its shadow cast by sunlight, the remaining words of the hymn take on a deeply personal note of gratitude:

Upon the cross of Jesus
  mine eye at times can see
the very dying form of One
  who suffered there for me:
and from my stricken heart with tears
  two wonders I confess,
the wonders of redeeming love
  and my unworthiness.  

 

This Triptych is comprised of three studio models of The Stations of the Cross. They are a personal gift from the artist. Standing before them, if we look carefully, we overhear the conversation between art and theology. When, in contemplation, we are attentive to beautiful and accomplished art, that conversation continues, even in silence.

So much of Christian faith is expressed and communicated in words, but words have their limitations. The Scottish theologian P T Forsyth, died almost exactly 100 years ago. His writing was once described by a reviewer as "like watching fireworks in a fog". Forsyth was well aware of his own stylistic limitations. But in fairness, the difficulty is experienced by every theologian seeking to talk with reverence about what for Christians is the deepest mystery of the universe.

"Words are hard to stretch to the measure of eternal things, without breaking under us somewhere," Forsyth once confessed. But few have wrestled with more determination to find thought and words worthy of such an urgent and sublime subject as the Cross of Christ. Some of Forsyth's most passionate and persuasive writing is found in such volumes as his slim masterpiece aptly titled, The Cruciality of the Cross.

Back to the triptych (above), and a theology of atonement without words. The first panel is brutal in its historical realism. Roman soldiers had done this work, and it was all in a day's work, hundreds if not thousands of time. The third panel conveys gentle tenderness as powerfully as the first portrays banal brutality. Between the indifferent act of crucifixion by a soldier, and the loving actions of those who loved Jesus, is the anguish of the Crucified, in the presence of His mother.

The centre panel has its own story, hinted in the detail. The extensive empty spaces surrounding Jesus, create a sense of stark contrast with the suffering Jesus. The flat, vacancy visually shouts a hard to grasp truth, that in the presence of such suffering every human word and artistic statement is silenced.

On one side, Jesus' mother stands, unable to help. Her presence is one of impotent love and infinite tenderness, physically helpless yet powerfully present. On the other side, beneath Jesus elbow, the outer edge of one of the other crosses, a reminder that Jesus is just one of three executed that day, and one of countless thousands in the history of Roman Imperial power and administration.

On the ground, the only other telling detail, a small pile of refuse, mere rubbish. Calvary was a dump, a place where worthless detritus was disposed of, and thrown away.

In the triptych, the crucified Christ stands between two panels, we could call them Cruelty and Love. In the central panel Christ stands between the determined love of the mother who gave him life, and that small pile of worthlessness which is a world broken, futureless and worthless.

Except, it is not so!

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting humanity's sins against them."

The Christian gazes on the cross with a hushed and grateful joy, with the quickened heart of the penitent and with the awakened wonder of the forgiven. Forsyth likewise for all his theological writing, acknowledged again and again: "It is beyond all thought, beyond poetry…God himself in that mighty joy, refrains from words."

Three panels. The first, sin in all its banality and brutality, the third, love that stays and will not go away. And in the centre, Jesus. Yes, it's all beyond words, beyond poetry. Though George Herbert, perhaps comes closest to stating the real mystery of Good Friday:

Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom'd the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love.

Wonderful art as they are, and profound the theology they convey, but these three Stations of the Cross, like every other art form and literary effort, ultimately fall short of our human capacity to explain. But then, they join every other human attempt to describe the love of God in Christ. How could it be otherwise when, "In vain the first-born seraph tries, to sound the depths of Love Divine."

We've learned to live with Covid over the past two years. But that first lockdown. The shock of learning a life threatening disease was spreading; the perplexity engendered by the unreality of immediate restrictions on when we could leave the house, go shopping, visit family and friends, go to a concert, attend church, play a round of golf and almost everything else that was ordinary, normal and routine.

The one concession was an hour's exercise, but within a set radius of home. So we walked. And walked. We varied the route, half an hour outwards, half an hour return. Right, that's it till tomorrow. Where we live, ten minutes takes you to the edge of town and into rural Aberdeenshire.

The photo is of a broken down fence, two concrete posts, the steel reinforcing bent and rusted, the wires only just holding them up. A crazy cruciform wreck of a fence, no longer needed to keep animals in the field which for several years has been intensively farmed. 

I remember quite clearly taking this photo. The digital date shows it was April 17, five days after Easter Sunday which was April 12 in 2020. It was the first and only year since 1967 I wasn't in church on Easter Sunday.

On 17 April 2020, the date of this photo, there were 54 deaths from Covid in Scotland, and the 7 day average was 48 and rising. The sadness and anxiety were palpable. It was hard not to be scared. Each day we, and most other folk, went out for our walk, came back, watched the news briefings, found something useful to do or interesting to watch. Then there were the reinforcing rituals of face-coverings, sanitiser, and the new aversion therapy called social distancing.

So at the turning point of our walk down to Skene village, there is this crazy broken down fence, its ruined posts an Easter conspiracy, an emotional ambush, like a mocked up Calvary, but witnessing to something deep enough to bear the weight of what had befallen us. I had cycled past that broken cruciform wreck so many times and didn't notice. But walking down that day, living now in a changed and chastened world, those concrete posts took on concrete significance.

Behind them the outer edges of the Highlands, and visible to the left, a glimpse of Loch Skene. The looming, hard-edged grey posts, stark against a light sky, were making a statement, or so it seemed to me. In all the suffering that was unfolding in the world, here, right at the turning point of the path, a Cross. We were troubled about illness and an increasing mortality rate, praying and cheering and willing on our medical scientists and virologists working flat out to find treatment and perhaps a vaccine, anxious on behalf of Health Service staff under increasing pressure and knowing worse was to come. And this broken old fence pushed us back to the previous Sunday, Easter Sunday.

Amongst the first casualties of a pandemic, if we're not careful, is hope. Followed quickly by faith. In a way too strange to explain, two accidental fencing posts interrupted whatever I was feeling – probably anything between self-pity, being more scared than I admit even to myself, and that inner guilt of those who are still safe (so far as we knew) when so many others were not. Corroded steel reinforcements, rusty wire, and crumbling concrete had conspired to demand my attention, and turn my mind to the Easter Christ, crucified and risen. 

In all the suffering of our world and our lives, there is the not always discernible reality of the Easter Christ, whose suffering for our broken world takes us, and our suffering, into the heart of God. I still pass these fenceposts on foot, on the bike, in the car – I cannot un-see what I've seen. 

Inscribed upon the cross we see
in shining letters, 'God is love';
he bears our sins upon the tree;
he brings us mercy from above.

The balm of life, the cure of woe,
the measure and the pledge of love,
the sinner's refuge here below,
the angels' theme in heaven above.

And to finish, two brief sentences from Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God, one of the theological masterpieces of the 20th Century. The first one could not be more apt for the photo!

“In concrete terms, God is revealed in the cross of Christ who was abandoned by God." 

“The theological foundation for Christian hope is the raising of the crucified Christ.” 

This image evokes so many memories for me, and so provokes numerous thoughts and emotions. It never fails to touch that deep place where faith, hope and love abide.

I choose that older quaint word 'abide' quite deliberately. "As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love." (John 15.9) In the background and foreground of those words is the cross, foreshadowed. "I take, O Cross, thy shadow for my abiding place…"

The photo is of the rose window in Crown Terrace Baptist Church. I remember nearly forty years ago asking one of the church members, a gifted carpenter, to make a plain cross as a focal point beneath that window. The combination of light and shadow, of word and image, creates a complex intersection which centres on the centre of the cross.

The text from the prologue of John's Gospel is relevant for both Advent and Easter. But especially in Holy Week, and with Good Friday approaching, those words surrounding the sunlight and shadow, vibrate with significance. "In Him was Life, and the Life was the Light of men." (John 1.4) Light comes through the cross; life comes through the dying of God's Son; the One who is Life and Light is God's gift to the world. 

Looking deeply into the centre of this photo, where the window of light is circled by sacred text, and is supported by the shadowed cross, I found my mind rehearsing the verse of a Christmas carol which, like the text, easily translates from Advent to Easter:     

               Light and Life to all he brings, risen with healing in his wings.

mild he lays his glory by, born that man no more may die

born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth,

Hark the herald angels sing, glory to the new born King.  

The Cross is the necessary prelude to resurrection, and resurrection the required climax of God's triumphant love. Easter combines darkness and light, death and life, despair and hope, violence and peace, hate and love, Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Those simple spars of wood, joined and shaped, placed just so beneath the lights and under the source of sunlight, draw our wondering eyes, and tell a story. And often enough, as I sit somewhere in this church, and reflect on my own story, of light and darkness, of life and death, of hope and despair, of joy and sadness, the words of that text, encircling the window and crowning the cross, reaffirm what it is I believe.

Because the story of Jesus draws us in, and invites us to join our story with His. I think of this text, window and cross, as a special place where it's possible to be put together again, the mind's fugitive thoughts regathered, the heart's anxieties and regrets brought to the place where we are fully understood, and where the story of my life so far can pause, before continuing on.

Because of Holy Week and its penultimate act of crucifixion, followed by the ultimate event of resurrection, some anonymous follower of Jesus wrote words that explain the mystery and the miracle of Easter, and how the story of Jesus becomes our story:

Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.  

Window frames, door panels, fence posts – these are a few of the everyday furniture I notice cruciform intersections. But it turns up in other places, some of them surprising and even incongruous.

We were in John Lewis in Aberdeen (before it closed down!), in the furnishing department. As we walked round, I saw this and took a photo. Some health and safety conscious member of staff had taped down the corners of the tiles to avoid customers tripping, with perhaps litigious consequences!

This is one of my favourite images of the cross, despite the lack of artistic intent. Isaiah 53 is one of the most powerful poems in the entire range of literature that makes up our Bible. It has from the earliest beginnings of Christian thinking, been associated with the passion and death of Jesus. Phrases like " no beauty", "despised and rejected", along with emotions of shame, and dismissive scorn are woven into a poem about the sufferings of the Servant of God – for Christians, Jesus of Nazareth.

Try it. Read Isaiah 53, remembering the tied hands, the soldiers' mockery, the stripes, the thorns, the whole paraphernalia of interrogation, humiliation and dehumanising torture. The parallels between Isaiah and the Gospel passion stories are unmistakable. One of my favourite Holy Week hymns, sung to a tune in minor key, expresses the anguish of being the despicable one whose suffering is mere entertainment, and whose body is there to be violated, trampled – yes, despised and rejected. 

A purple robe, a crown of thorn,
a reed in his right hand;
before the soldiers' spite and scorn
I see my Saviour stand.

He bears between the Roman guard
the weight of all our woe;
a stumbling figure bowed and scarred
I see my Saviour go.  

On a Saturday morning in John Lewis's, I saw a cross made of tape, trampled by countless feet, mostly unnoticed, dirty and worn, an image not worth a second look. Until, following that first look the sign of the cross and its deeper significance is allowed to emerge. Trampled, dirty, worn, but the cruciform shape still unmistakable. 

The cross has been an artefact throughout Christian history, and not always as a sign of reconciliation and peace. Manufactured crosses are strewn throughout history and place, from fabulous gold encrusted with jewels to plain wooden carvings, from wrought iron to paint and canvas, and from textiles to sculpture. But now and then there is the accidental, the incidental, when the cross is seen where it is least expected to be – on a shop floor for instance.

I look at this photo now and think of the Crucified Christ, that whole parody of justice in which a life of perfect love to God and others was besmirched, trampled on, by countless eyes unnoticed. Holy Week can easily become a form of domesticated spirituality, the cross seen through eyes that are familiar with the story, its anguish domesticated and diluted over decades of Holy Weeks

An image of soiled duck tape used as a temporary repair, might just help us to acknowledge how easily through familiarity and years of practice, we filter out the banality of evil, the lack of beauty, the scorn and cruelty and terrifying spectacle of indifference to human suffering. 

There is a carelessness by which the cross of Christ doesn't always tower over the wrecks of time; instead it becomes invisible to hearts too preoccupied to realise what it is we trample. 

Fast to the cross's spreading span,
high in the sunlit air,
all the unnumbered sins of man
I see my Saviour bear.

He hangs, by whom the world was made,
beneath the darkened sky;
the everlasting ransom paid,
I see my Saviour die.

(There is a good rendition of "A Purple Robe" available here. )